A Quest - The Best $200 Bowie

[Bigfatts]

Muela makes the Alamo and Apache. Both good looking knives although I don't know how they stack up as far as hostorical accuracy is concerned.

 

[Bigfattyt]

Get the Carbon Steel Cold Steel Natchez Bowie. My only beef is that I wish they gave it a leather sheath instead of a plastic one

My beef would be that they went with a weak tang (stub tang welded to a cable cinched with a nut). Unless they changed construction since the last few broken handles I have seen posted.

 

[meanwhile]

Let's say I've got $200 burning a hole in my pocket and I've got a hankering to buy a 'classic' Bowie-style blade. What are my options? Where is my money best spent?

I'm looking for the best interpretation of the classic Bowie available at a $200 price point. What do I mean by 'classic'? I realize that nobody knows just what the knife Jim Bowie carried actually looked like; his design has been guessed at and re-interpreted down through the years. However, we do have some early examples to follow so let's use the Moore Bowie as a guide:

View attachment 292356

But all the early examples look nothing like the Moore; the Moore is an undoubted fake. You might want to read eg

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/history/bios/bowie/knife_like_bowies.html

Early bowies look this -

...and this knife is not only autheticated as an early, it matches the written descriptions of Bowie's knife. Eg from wikipedia:

The blade, as later described by Rezin Bowie, was 9.5 inches (24 cm) long, 0.25 inches (0.64 cm) thick and 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) wide. It was straight-backed, described by witnessess as "a large butcher knife", and having no clip point nor any hand guard, with a simple riveted wood scale handle.[6]

Bowies like the Moore don't appear until decades later - it's built to match a penny dreadful reader's idea of what Bowie's knife should have look like, not a realistic knife for him to have carried - it isn't even a smart fake. If you want to a fantasy knife, or a movie prop knife, or even a WW2 survival knife, fine. But please don't distort history by promoting fakes like the Moore.

If you want a good sub $200 bowie, the $25 MTech 151 is very hard to beat. If you want it to look like a prop from the Alamo, then strip the black blade coating and swap the kraton handle for slabs of wood or leather washers.

 

[goodeyesniper]

I've never been interested in a bowie until I saw this video of the guy using the hell out of the Svord Von Tempsky. It's got that rugged, no frills look I'd imagine early bowies actually having...

[video=youtube;5r4E2n83dmk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r4E2n83dmk[/video]

 

[meanwhile]

I've never been interested in a bowie until I saw this video of the guy using the hell out of the Svord Von Tempsky. It's got that rugged, no frills look I'd imagine early bowies actually having...

Yes, it does look the way you'd imagine an early bowie would. But again, no. Very early bowies were meant as fighters and perhaps hunting knives rather than wood choppers. And when all-round bowies did arrive, knifemakers of the day would have been ashamed to put a handle like that Svord's on them - bowie handles were all about retention. Eg this is a Civil War bowie:

The Svord just makes me wince:

In its defense, it isn't made of polished glass and delivered covered with grease, but I don't know else I could say in its favour...

Remember that people had a lot more familiarity with sharp edged things than we do today - swords were still used as weapons - so even early bowies would usually have ergnomonically sophisticated handle designs.

 

[Big Mike]

My idea of the classic Bowie.

Big Mike